For the Love of a Wild Thing
by SouthSideStory
Summary: For a moment—just a moment—Rey allows herself to imagine a world outside of Jakku. A far away place, green and beautiful, where she could be free.
1. The Poor Man's Daughter

**CHAPTER ONE**

 **The Poor Man's Daughter**

* * *

 _Trigger warning for descriptions of child abuse._

* * *

Rey searches the much picked over wreck of an imperial-class star destroyer, looking through its hollowed out innards for choice pieces. Prizes that might buy portions for herself and her family. The old ship is a graveyard of oxidized junk, already looted many times, and so she climbs high—higher than Lari likes, and her oldest sister calls up, saying, "Be careful!"

Rey has always been the most sure-footed, the strongest and most graceful of her sisters. She isn't afraid to fall, because she knows with a strange sort of certainty that she won't.

She wrenches rusted panelling out of the way and digs through the dead machinery beneath, until she finds what she's looking for: a crystal resonator.

"Got it!" Rey shouts, and then she starts the long climb back down. They're out of rope, and haven't been able to afford to buy more at Niima Outpost, so there will be no quick descent today. It's so warm that Rey can barely breathe, a muggy, suffocating heat that makes her sweat all over. By the time she reaches the ground, her shirt is sticking to her back, and her mouth feels drier than the sands outside.

"Have you got any water left?" Lari asks her.

"No," Rey says, surly.

"What have I told you about saving some for the trip home?" Perra rolls her pretty blue eyes, but she gives Rey her own canteen just the same.

She takes a shallow sip, careful not to drink the last of her sister's water, grateful and a little irritated at once.

They carry their finds back to the three-seated speeder that Lari built four years ago. Her sister can make anything out of the right kind of junk, and even this thrown together vehicle—pieced into purpose out of things abandoned and unwanted—runs better than any other that frequents Niima. Rey knows the ins and outs of every bit of imperial and rebel tech to fall to its destruction on Jakku, but she doesn't have Lari's keen, creative eye for construction.

Once the speeder is loaded, they climb up, Rey into the driver's seat, and make the trip to the outpost. They had to go a long way to find a wreck worth scavenging, so it takes a good hour to reach Niima. Perra, the fastidious one of the three of them, scrubs their most valuable pieces at the acid baths, and then Lari spearheads the bartering with Unkar Plutt. She knows the worth of the tech better than Perra—who hates scavenging almost as much as she hates the desert—and she's far more diplomatic than Rey.

The Blobfish tries to cheat them, offering less than half of what the crystal resonator is worth, but Lari manages to talk him up to a more reasonable price in that calm, firm way she has. They walk away with enough portions to feed their whole family for the night and a small pack of painkillers for Mum.

"It's not a bad haul," Perra says. Then she reaches over and ruffles Rey's trio of buns, no doubt simply to annoy her.

"Quit that—" Rey hisses, but she's only just swatted Perra's hand away when she sees a tall man on the outskirts of Niima, trying to mount their speeder.

"Hey!" she shouts. "Get your hands off that!"

She sprints to the speeder, which is revving to life, and pulls her quarterstaff as she runs. Rey recognizes the man now as Helok Zar, a skinny scavenger who's been growing thinner by the day. No doubt desperation drove him to thievery, but Rey doesn't care whether he's starving or not. Without that speeder, her family doesn't eat. Without that speeder, her mother could die.

She knocks him out of the driver's seat with a vicious blow to the stomach. Zar falls to the ground, cursing and groaning, gripping his middle. Rey hits him again, this time across the back of the head, and he slumps to the sands, clearly dizzy and disoriented, but not unconscious. She should stop, she knows that, but every blow makes her feel stronger, more powerful and less defeated by this desert, less bound to this life. Rey smacks him across the face with the end of her staff, and Zar spits out blood and teeth. She makes to kick him in the belly too, but then she hears, as if from far away, that Lari is shouting and Perra is crying, both begging her to stop.

She lowers her weapon and looks at Zar, really looks for the first time since she saw him trying to make off with their speeder. He's skin and bones, really, half-dead already, and now he has a seeping head wound and a broken mouth.

"Let's go," Rey says. "We need to get this medicine to Mum."

She takes her seat at the front of the speeder and waits for her sisters to climb up after her.

"You went too far," Lari says.

Perra frowns at Zar, trembling and bleeding on the ground. "Maybe we should help him—"

"You're too soft-hearted," Rey says, but her voice shakes a little on the reprimand.

For the whole ride home, it isn't the sight of Helok Zar, injured and starved, that haunts her, though. It's that sensation she had when she attacked him, the power and purpose that flooded her veins. It made her feel alive.

* * *

Rey's home is a one-room shack, a hybrid of scavenged pieces, the child of rebel and imperial wreckage: sand-coated, rusting, and lopsided. There are two pallets of musty blankets, and Mum lies on the smaller one, eating pieces of green protein pith and water bread from Perra's hand. Every minute or so the quiet of the house is broken by her mother's coughing. The rough sound of a dying woman's hacking and the rattling breaths in between.

Jakku offers little in the way of medical treatment. Painkillers and cough suppressants are the best they can scrounge at Niima Outpost, but even those are costly, and they do little enough to help ease Mum's suffering.

A wooden crate serves as the table, and this is where Rey, Lari, and their father sit now.

"How's Mum been today?" Rey whispers. She keeps her voice down because her mother doesn't like it when her daughters ask after her health.

Dad chews his bread, thoughtful and quiet as always, before he swallows and says, "No better. No worse."

Rey nods and returns to eating her own food. She's so hungry that she wants to shovel it into her mouth and lick her fingers clean, but her father hates it when she does that. He tells her not to eat like an animal, no matter how famished she is. So Rey forces herself to eat slowly and carefully, hoping that she won't earn Dad's anger somehow.

That hope is short-lived, because Lari says, "A man tried to steal our speeder today."

Dad looks up, directly at Rey, and asks, "How did you stop him?"

She knows what's coming already. The blame, the fury, the punishment. Whenever Rey gets in a fight, no matter how justified, it's always the same.

"I beat him," she says, picking at her bread. "Is that what you want to hear?"

Dad scowls. "You know it isn't."

"What should I have done? Let a thief steal our speeder?" Rey asks.

She's treading dangerous ground now. Her father hates being talked back to, and he's quick to raise a hand to her when she smarts off at him. Rey has been smacked in the face more times than she can count for comments less provocative than this, and she can tell from Dad's hard expression that he's close to coming around the crate and backhanding her.

He never hits Lari or Perra. Just Rey. When she was a child, she wondered why this was, what she'd done wrong to deserve the pain. Now she doesn't bother giving it any consideration; she gave up on understanding her father many years ago.

"One more fight and I'm taking your quarterstaff," Dad warns. "Now leave the table."

"I'm not done eating," Rey says, and she hates how timid she sounds. How weak. She's a strong girl, but in the face of her father's anger she always grows so small.

"Lari can have the rest of your food." Her father reaches across the crate and pushes Rey's plate over to her sister.

"Dad, please don't do that," Lari says, and she sounds suddenly panicked. "Rey was just protecting us—"

"Be quiet and do as you're told," he says, in a tone that brooks no argument.

Rey leaves the table and goes outside. Their whole ramshackle house shakes when she slams the door behind her, but she doesn't care. Let the whole damn thing fall down, for all it matters to her. Rey hates this broken home and her hard-handed father. Hates her mother, who rarely speaks up in her defense, and her sisters, who never get punished.

She sits in the sand with her back pressed against the metal wall of her scavenged house, fighting hunger pains and tears. Her stomach growls fiercely, twists in the very pit of her, and to distract herself from this hurt, Rey starts picking out constellations in the star-speckled sky. Mum taught her how to find them when she was a little girl, before she fell so ill.

For a moment—just a moment—she allows herself to imagine a world outside of Jakku. A far away place, green and beautiful, where she could be free.

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** This is the first chapter of my story for the Reylo fairy tale anthology, _Keeping the Stars Apart_ , which Next to Something and I are heading up! The sign-up period is closed, but if you want to keep up with the project, follow reylofanfictionanthology over at tumblr. I chose the fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon for my retelling. So, if you're familiar with that story, you can probably guess what's coming up in Chapter 2. ;)

The title of this story comes from a quote from Edith Pattou's lovely novel _East_ : "That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door." Also, the illustration I used to make the cover for this fic is by Kay Nielsen. (It was labeled as available for reuse with modification by Google images.)


	2. Bargaining

**CHAPTER TWO**

 **Bargaining**

* * *

She wakes in the middle of the night, startled by the sound of the door opening. Rey grabs her quarterstaff and scrambles to her feet. A man stands in the middle of the shack, tall and masked, all in black, framed by the night sky that peeks through the doorway. She makes to hit him, but the stranger ignites a lightsaber—a weapon out of legends, one Rey had never thought to see. Its red glow dispels the darkness, a crackling beam of unsteady light, and with a lazy movement he slices her quarterstaff in half.

 _I'm going to die_ , she thinks. _We're all going to die_.

Rey bites back her fear, lets her anger fuel her strength, and makes to attack him again, but he holds out his left hand toward her, and with a simple, controlled flick of his wrist she finds herself frozen. Held in place more surely than if he'd restrained her physically.

The man approaches, saber lowered but still ignited, bathing him in a wavering scarlet light. "You're brave," he says, "if not very smart."

His voice is deep and distorted, more mechanical than human, and something about it sends a thrill through her.

Rey struggles against this impossible hold, a violation of every natural law she knows, but it's useless. He approaches, careful not to graze her with his lightsaber, and tilts his head to the side. She has the feeling, somehow, that he's examining her. Looking her up and down and taking stock of her value.

Then he touches her cheek with his free hand. Leather gloves separate his skin from hers, but Rey can still feel the warmth of him, the heat of a living person underneath all that black. There's a surprising gentleness to his caress, a delicate intimacy at odds with the violence he restrains her with.

The man lowers his hand and Rey relaxes as the freedom of movement returns to her body. He turns away from her, as if she is inconsequential now, and stalks toward her father. She sees that Dad and her sisters are all standing, Lari holding Perra in her arms. Mother, who has been bedridden for nearly a year now, remains on her pallet, but she's sitting up, her eyes wide.

The intruder holds his lightsaber an inch from her father's neck and says, "Hello, Levvi."

Rey frowns, because that isn't Dad's given name. She expects her father to correct this man, but instead he says, "So you've found me."

"The Supreme Leader has been looking for you for a long time. You hid yourself well, here on a junkyard of a planet. Who would have thought you'd be reduced to living like this?" He looks around their shack, and Rey doesn't have to see his face to know his disdain and disgust.

"What do you want with me?" Dad asks. "I'm not strong in the Force. Surely your master knows that."

"You may be weak, but your blood is not," says the stranger. "You know it as well as I do."

Now he turns back at Rey, strides over to her until there's not a foot of space separating them. She's free to move, but for some reason she can't find the will to take a step back. She hears the barely checked anger in his voice when he speaks. "That's why he hates you. Why he beats you. You're stronger than him, more powerful than he could ever hope to be, and he's sick with jealousy and fear."

"What are you talking about?" Rey asks. "Who are you?"

"My name is Kylo Ren, and I will be your teacher," he says. "But the better question is to ask who _you_ are."

"I know who I am. I'm Rey."

A soft, staticky laugh permeates the air, Kylo's cruel humor infecting the space between them. "You truly think that you're nothing but a desert rat? Meant to be no more than a vulture who scavenges starships for her daily bread?"

"I'm not ashamed of myself," Rey says, and she lifts her chin, hoping to display more defiance and courage than she feels.

"You shouldn't be," says Kylo. "You're the granddaughter of the greatest emperor and Sith that this galaxy has ever known: Darth Sidious. And you, like your father's father, are strong in the Force. Unrefined, untrained, but powerful."

This seems too outrageous to believe, but Rey only has to glance at Dad, at his pale face twisted in anger, to know that it's true.

"The girl is coming with me," Kylo says to her father, in a tone that brooks no argument. "But I am not unfair. To compensate you for the loss, you and your family will have enough credits to live wealthily for the rest of your days."

"No!" Mum shouts, and she drags herself to her feet for the first time in months. She trembles from the effort and begins to cough, an ugly hacking sound that Rey has grown only too familiar with. Perra rushes to their mother's side and helps support her. "You're not taking my daughter. I don't care how much money you throw at us."

Rey watches Mum struggle to stay standing, listens to her labored breaths. With enough credits, her family could leave Jakku forever. With enough credits, her mother might live a full, healthy life, instead of one stunted by illness and misery.

And there's a part of Rey that desires to follow this man. To seek the power he swears is within her grasp. She's had enough of feeling weak, of being helpless. If there's strength to be had, she wants to seize it.

"It's all right," Rey says. "I'll go."

She looks to Kylo, and even though his face is shielded by that impassive mask, she can tell he's pleased. Like a proud teacher whose student has finally found the correct answer to a difficult problem.

* * *

The _Finalizer_ is the grandest ship Rey could have imagined. It's a resurgent-class star destroyer, a descendant of the imperial wreckage she's been navigating all her life. Everything aboard it is neat, orderly, and of the highest quality. Whoever runs it must have a most fastidious, unyielding nature.

Kylo takes her to his own quarters, where he plays the gallant. "You're my guest," he says, then offers her a glass of red Coruscanti wine. How easily he switches between roles, from intimidating abductor to genial host, she thinks—but she takes the glass just the same. The wine tastes rich and a little bitter. Although she has nothing to compare it to, Rey suspects the vintage to be very fine, if only because it is in this man's possession.

His sitting room is as spartan as everything else aboard this ship, no traces of a private touch anywhere. Even living in desperate poverty on Jakku, Rey had more personal things to her name than this man seems to.

She glimpses a perfectly made bed through an open door, and she realizes belatedly that she's peeking into his bedroom.

Rey looks away, blushing, and sips her wine, careful not to drink too much too fast. Her head is still spinning from the revelation of her heritage. She's no one, a scavenger from a backwater world. How could she possibly be the granddaughter of an emperor? And she can scarcely believe that she allowed herself to be sold for credits, like a slave.

"Where are you taking me?" Rey asks.

"To a planet in the Rakai System called Kobol." Kylo does not pour a glass of wine for himself. He remains masked, strong arms crossed over his chest. "It's the First Order's second largest base, and the Supreme Leader is there at this moment. When you go before him, I suggest that you call upon whatever manners you have, if you value your life. He does not respond well to impertinence."

Silence falls between them, and Rey reflects on the gravity of her situation. She has signed herself over to the untender tutelage of a cruel stranger, her life is in danger, and she may never see her mother and sisters again. Rey might regret her choice to follow Kylo Ren if she thought for a moment that he'd have left her in peace. With or without her consent, she's certain he would have taken her from her family.

"Are you afraid?" Kylo asks.

"No, I'm not," Rey says, and to her surprise, she finds that this is true.

* * *

Kobol is a jungle planet, greener than anything she's ever seen. It's as hot as Jakku, but humid rather than dry, and Rey is sweating by the time she reaches the First Order base. Kylo leads her down to the bottom of the building, and with each level they descend, the air grows colder.

He stops her before they enter Snoke's chamber and says, "Let me do the talking, unless he addresses you directly. Understood?"

Rey nods, then follows him inside. The Supreme Leader's great room is large, shadowed, and empty, boasting nothing except for a single stone chair, raised up on a dais like a throne. In it sits a shriveled man, far too frail-looking to indicate the power he exudes. It rolls off of him in waves, a dark energy that is almost suffocating.

"This is Sidious's heir?" Snoke asks.

"Yes, Supreme Leader. She is strong already, despite her lack of training," Kylo says. "If you approve, I could show her the ways of the Force—"

"You wish to teach her yourself? How endearing," Snoke says, and something like humor twists his mouth. "I'll allow it, for the present."

Kylo nods, the picture of deference. "Thank you, master. I will not disappoint you in this."

"You had better not," Snoke warns. "I can feel her power, and someday it will rival that of her grandfather. Such great potential deserves a worthy instructor."

The Supreme Leader's smirk widens, and his amusement makes Rey nervous, because she doesn't yet know its source.

"There's something else," he says. Snoke laces his fingers together and leans forward in his seat. "A rare opportunity has presented itself, a chance to merge two of the greatest bloodlines in the history of our galaxy. You will get a child on this girl by the end of the year."

Rey shivers, from fear as much as the cold. Surely he can't be suggesting that she rut with a stranger like a breeding animal?

Kylo looks up sharply, and even without the luxury of seeing his expression, Rey can tell he's every bit as panicked as she is. "With all due respect, master, I—I must refuse this order."

"You grow too bold for your own good, Kylo Ren," Snoke says silkily. "It is not in your power to refuse me. Perhaps you need a reminder of your place."

Snoke waves his hand in Kylo's direction, and he falls to his knees, hands gripping his helmet. He grunts in pain, and when Snoke twists his fingers just so, Kylo screams. The sound is distorted by his mask's modulator and amplified by the acoustics of this chamber. A horrible sound that Rey can hardly bear to listen to, echoing around the vast room.

"Stop!" she shouts, when she can't stand the pitiful cries any longer.

Snoke lowers his hand, and Kylo's screams fade into ragged whimpers.

"I wondered how long you could tolerate that," the Supreme Leader admits, now looking at Rey. "You withstood his pain better than I expected, for a girl who hasn't been taught anything of the dark side."

This may be something like a compliment from Snoke, but it makes Rey feel sick to her stomach.

He turns back to his apprentice and says, "You can hide nothing from me, and you cannot resist me. You will do as I have commanded. Do you understand?"

Kylo stands on shaking legs, and when he speaks, Rey can tell that he's crying beneath his mask. "Yes, Supreme Leader," he says, voice shaking. "I understand."

* * *

 **Author's Notes:** Thank you so much Next to Something for helping me straighten out the kinks in this chapter! Your input is always so helpful and valued.

So, yes, I'm going with the Snoke-orders-a-Reylo-baby route, but expect some subversion of this trope, because that's how I roll. ;)

Unless I have to make serious adjustments to my outline, this should be a nine-chapter story, so there's a good ways left to go. I hope you guys enjoy the ride.

(Also, there's a Battlestar Galactica reference in this chapter, for those nerdy enough to catch it!)


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